


Thicker Than Blood

by altschmerzes



Series: Whumptober 2020 [4]
Category: 9-1-1 (TV)
Genre: Athena Grant and Bobby Nash are Evan "Buck" Buckley's Parents, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Head Injury, Hurt/Comfort, Memory Issues, Team as Family, Trapped, Whump, Whumptober 2020, Worried Bobby Nash, collapsed building, not much ACTUAL blood but quite a bit of imagined hypothetical blood described
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-17 23:28:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29479932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altschmerzes/pseuds/altschmerzes
Summary: Bobby and Buck are in a parking garage when part of the structure collapses, trapping them both inside. The collapse itself isn't too bad. The problem is that Bobby can't find Buck, and is too concussed to remember that Buck is no longer on the blood thinners that could make even a minor injury lethal.Bobby struggles to communicate to the incident commander outside, a stranger, as well as to Athena, exactly why it's so important that he remain inside the collapse. But Buck's never left him behind, even when ordered to. He's not about to betray that in return.(for the whumptober 2020 prompt "collapsed building")
Relationships: Background Bobby Nash/Athena Grant, Evan "Buck" Buckley & Bobby Nash
Series: Whumptober 2020 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1964482
Comments: 24
Kudos: 210
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	Thicker Than Blood

**Author's Note:**

> "gav are you really posting whumptober 2020 fic in feburary 2021" yes i am <3\. for real i have the whole 31 prompts from whumptober planned and at least half of them written to some degree so uh. bon apetit enjoy this extremely out of season set of fics. 
> 
> i'm still in my feelings about the blood thinners thing and i don't think we quite capitalized on that as much as we could have. also this fandom is very slim on gen fic so i am gonna bust through the ceiling with as much as possible, enjoy.
> 
> (apologies if this is a little disorganized - writing from the pov of a concussed character? would not recommend it.)

When Bobby wakes up, it’s night. He blinks into unrelenting gloom and shifts, trying to find a position more comfortable than this one - his back is killing him. The surface beneath him is hard and uneven which makes him frown and shift further, staring into the featureless black for any indication of why his bed suddenly feels like he’s laying on… The thought trails off as the pieces click slowly together, one following the other in a sluggish, interrupted replica of Bobby’s usually sharp sense of deduction. 

The air is thick and it tastes funny, nearly triggering a coughing fit when Bobby breathes in too deeply. Sharp, hard edges jab into his back, pressing into his ribs when he rolls onto his side, jarring his elbow on something that shifts and clatters when he hits it. Bobby’s whole body aches in patches of loud pain. It’s the worst at the back of his head, to the side somewhat behind his left ear, pulsing in time with his heartbeat. And when he hefts himself up, palms grinding into ground that feels like gravel under him, uneven and ridged, it all comes together.

What happened. It’s not night. 

When Bobby walked into the parking garage it had been the middle of the afternoon. It had taken him a long moment to adjust to the darkened space, blinking around at the parked cars while he listened to the conversation behind him. It cut off abruptly, Athena’s sentence ending prematurely as she realized she’d left her bag behind in the restaurant where the three of them had been having lunch. Bobby was left alone in the parking lot, except. Except that he wasn’t. Because- 

Conversation behind him. The three of them had been having lunch. Buck, walking up ahead, past Bobby to the edge of the parking garage, peering down at the street and waving at where Athena must be, making the quick jog across to the little Thai place they’d just finished eating at. Buck, standing in the exact place he’d been the last time Bobby saw him, the moment before the ground started shaking and the ceiling came down around him.

“Buck!” Bobby is yelling before he’d realized he was speaking at all, voice echoing eerily into the fuzzy darkness around him. The force of the shout, the name leaving his lungs in an instinctive burst, makes the ache in his head surge harder and louder, overwhelming him and nearly sending him back down again. Gritting his teeth, Bobby steadies his palms against the rubble on the ground, pushing himself up until he’s standing, unsteady but on his feet. 

Falling is not an option. Sitting down and staying down, heeding the signals being sent by a skull that feels like it’s trying to splinter itself apart at the seams, closing his eyes and breathing slowly until he feels like the world’s righted itself, none of those things, tempting as they are, are options. Because the last time Bobby saw Buck he was standing thirty feet away across the second floor of a parking garage whose roof seems to have just come down, and now Bobby can’t see anything at all. 

“Buck!” he yells again, then inhales sharply, the back of his head throbbing in punishment for the exertion. There’s no response this time either. Inanimate, structural groans echo around and over Bobby, the building settling into its foundations after a massive shift.

Despite how long he’s been here, Bobby still can’t quite tell from what he remembers through his pain-fogged mind if it was an earthquake or an isolated collapse, some massive force of nature or a small, man-made mistake. Maybe it’s because decades in Minnesota can’t be overwritten by a handful of years in California and he still doesn’t have the instincts of people who grew up here, maybe it’s because he’s definitely got some kind of head injury, but it doesn’t matter. The facts are these: The ceiling came down, or at least part of it did. The floor, mercifully, stayed put. He can’t hear any car alarms shrieking, which means it likely wasn’t all of the ceiling either. Bobby can’t totally remember, but he doesn't think there were too many cars around the corner of the garage they had been in. Athena wasn’t in the building, but Buck was, and now Bobby can’t see him and he’s not answering when his name is called. 

That’s the most frightening part. Not that Bobby can’t see six inches in front of his face, not that his whole body aches like he just went ten rounds with an opponent two weight classes too high, not that he’s now trapped in what used to be a parking garage. It’s that Bobby is calling Buck’s name, and Buck isn’t making a single sound in response. Buck never ignores him. He may snark, or complain, or argue, but he never ignores Bobby outright, and most of the time, problem with authority or no, he jumps to do what he’s told when Bobby is the one doing the telling. Athena once shook her head and told Bobby ‘that boy would die before he let you down’ and though he’d greeted the sentence with a fond eye-roll and a quick dismissal at the time, it haunts him now. Because he’s calling Buck’s name. _Shouting_ it. 

(Buck hates when people raise their voices at him, he doesn’t handle it well, never has the entire time Bobby’s known him and he’d made a silent promise to himself to avoid yelling at the kid whenever possible, which wasn’t his leadership style in the first place, and…) 

And now he’s shouting, projecting his voice as loud as he can force it to go with his bruised chest and rattled head, and Buck’s not answering. Not a sound, not even a shift in the rubble. Every moment that passes the sound of Buck’s voice not answering grows louder and Bobby is starting to really panic. 

One of the car alarms he’d noted hadn’t been triggered earlier is going off now. Bobby can’t figure out what could have set it off given there hadn’t been a second collapse and he hadn’t heard any major shifts in the debris, but it’s happening nonetheless. Except that, no, that’s not a car alarm at all. It’s a ringtone. There’s an odd feeling at his hip and when he reaches down, the bright light of Bobby’s phone screen, shot through though it is with lightning bolts of deep cracks, lances straight through his throbbing skull. Once the stars clear, he manages to corral his fingers into cooperating and jabbing the distorted green accept button. 

“Bobby?” The frantic voice on the other end of the call is immediately identifiable, even though the name on caller ID had been unreadable because of how badly the screen had been shattered. 

“Athena,” he says, voice nearly breaking in relief at being able to talk to someone he knew. 

“Thank God, are you hurt? Where are you, can you get out safely?”

Bypassing the questions he’d asked, Bobby shakes his head, a move he immediately regrets when it makes the pain ratchet up several notches. It doesn’t matter if he’s hurt or not, he has a far greater priority, and he tells her as much when the name lurches out of his mouth, too loud in the suffocating darkness. “Buck. I can’t find Buck, Athena, he’s not answering me. I can’t see him and he’s not answering, you know he wouldn’t- I can’t find him.”

“What? What do you-” Athena’s voice fades like she’s pulled the phone away from her head and Bobby’s heart beats faster. It doesn’t calm even a fraction until the sound of her returns, muffled words coming clear again, quick and clipped. “Bobby, I’m here with Captain Raina Elyan, she’s with ladder 103, they responded to the scene, I’m giving her the phone. Do not hang up, she needs to speak to you.”

The name seems vaguely familiar but Bobby doesn’t know if he’s ever met the woman directly. He doesn’t interact much with that station, it’s on practically the complete opposite end of the city and they’ve never been called out to assist on the same scene. When she comes on the line, he doesn’t recognize her voice either. 

“Captain Nash, Bobby, this is Captain Raina Elyan, are you injured?”

Bobby bypasses the question for a second time, dismissing it from Captain Elyan as easily as he’d ignored it coming from his wife. “I can’t find him,” he says instead, looking around, stretching the hand not holding the phone out in front of him, fingertips coming up hard against a slab of concrete that was closer than he’d remembered it being. It stings, the surface abrasive and unyielding under his already scraped skin, but he doesn’t care. It’s a small pain compared to what could be happening to Buck right now, the damage that could be worsening by the moment. There’s something he should be remembering, something important, something that means Buck is in even more in danger than-

“Captain Nash,” Elyan repeats through the speaker, her voice rising louder through the phone as if she thought he didn’t hear her the first time. “Are you badly hurt?”

“No,” he says in a rush, understanding somewhere that she’s not going to stop asking until he gives her an answer, and the sooner Bobby gives her an answer, the sooner they can focus on what’s actually important right now. “I’m fine.” Whether or not that’s strictly true is debatable, but Bobby can’t bring himself to care. “But I can’t find Buck. You have to- Somebody has to get in here and help me find Buck.”

“Buck? Who is-” In the middle of the question, Elyan suddenly cuts herself off, a faint rush of air indicating the person on the other end has pulled the phone away from their head again. A faint distorted sound indicates there’s some kind of conversation happening, and Bobby doesn’t waste time trying to figure out what they’re saying. 

His free hand still feeling along the concrete, Bobby starts taking steps to the side. First thing he needs to do is form at least a mental map of where he is. Then he can figure out how to get out of what his gut tells him is a small space and into the rest of the half-collapsed garage where he’s sure Buck has to be either trapped or unconscious. As far as he can tell, taking careful steps over uneven ground, he comes to the conclusion that he’s trapped in a triangular space, one large piece of the roof tipped down and keeping him stuck. It gets lower to the ground the further forward he steps, until it’s too low for Bobby to keep a hand on without stooping lower than he can force his back to cooperate with at present. There’s one part that seems like it might have some give, a narrower piece of sheet metal that had come down from somewhere Bobby can’t quite figure out and is materially irrelevant anyway.

There’s something else still gnawing at the edges of Bobby’s mind, some other reason he knows he needs to be moving fast other than the obvious. There’s an urgency here even beyond the base situation of it, and he can’t quite put his finger on what it is, only that it’s making his heart lurch in panicked little jumps every time he thinks for the hundredth time in the last minute _Buck is here somewhere, hurt, and I can’t find him._ Every time he thinks he’s grasped ahold of it the answer just slips away again and Bobby can feel the anxiety rising higher and higher in his chest, clinging to the inside of his throat thicker than any dust. 

“Okay, Captain Nash, you said you couldn’t find Buck?” asks the voice that cuts through Bobby’s disorganized and increasingly distressed thoughts when Elyan returns from wherever she’d disappeared to. “That’s Evan Buckley, right? Someone here with me on the 103 was in his training class, says he’s with the 118 now, right?”

“Yeah,” Bobby answers, distracted and a little irritated by the questions. They won’t help him find Buck, and he has to find Buck. That’s the only thing that’s important right now. He puts his hands back out, feeling around the edges of the main slab of concrete keeping him stuck in the space he’d woken up in, but something isn’t quite right. Eventually he realizes that the phone the voice of Elyan was coming from is still in one of his hands, and having his fingers curled around it is hampering his attempts to find any gaps. Pulling it back up to his ear, Bobby gets ready to tell her he has to hang up, because he can’t keep looking for Buck if his hands are occupied holding a phone.

“Bobby, are you still there? Can you hear me? I need you to answer me, okay?” The words come into clarity when the phone gets close enough to his ear, chasing away anything Bobby had been about to say himself.

“I can’t,” he says vaguely, looking around and squinting at things he can still only barely see. His eyes have adjusted, but there’s only so far eyes can adjust to absorb minimal light when there’s almost no light at all to absorb. “I’ve got to…” Bobby’s hand is moving again, carrying the phone away from his ear on autopilot before the sound of Elyan speaking again forces him to pull it back.

“You need to help our guys get you out of there, Bobby.” She’s saying his name a lot. It’s like she thinks maybe he’s forgotten it, or maybe she’s trying to keep him focused. Which is working, given every time she says it his attention snaps back to the phone, and it’s getting irritating. His attention is needed elsewhere. He can’t be focused on this phone, this conversation that keeps becoming about _him_ when the one they need to be talking about is _Buck._ “We’re making our way to you, but we need you to-”

“I can’t,” Bobby says again, more urgently this time, because he remembers now. What he was supposed to be doing with his hand, the thing that’s so much more important than this conversation, than Elyan’s instructions trying to get him out of that half-ruined parking garage. “I can’t find him, I need my hands, I need to hang up. I can’t keep talking. I need my hands.”

“Wait! Don’t hang up yet. Listen to me.” She says it urgently and quickly enough that it stops Bobby in his tracks, head swimming like the force of the words had knocked him off balance. “Put the phone on speaker, okay? Do you have a pocket in your shirt?”

Frowning, unsure what that has to do with _anything,_ Bobby pats at his chest for a moment, then nods. “Yeah, it does.”

“Good,” the slightly tinny voice says. She sounds relieved, which Bobby doesn’t understand. There’s nothing relieving about this. “Put the call on speaker and put your phone in your shirt pocket. That way you have your hands, but we can keep talking. Okay?”

It’s not a bad idea, and Bobby complies, slipping the phone into the pocket and immediately relieved when he finds it works, allowing him to have use of both his hands while still being able to communicate with this irritatingly persistent other station captain. The light of his phone screen, shining through the material of his shirt pocket, gives an eerie glow to the hazy air just in front of him. At least it makes it slightly easier to see, a small mercy from this distracting conversation.

“Can you still hear me, Captain Nash?” It’s somewhat unnerving to hear the voice ringing out in the small area he’s trapped in, echoing off uneven surfaces so that it’s hard to identify the exact origin point of the sound. Bobby is reminded when it sounds again, repeating, “Captain Nash?”

“Yeah,” he says distractedly. The rubble in front of him doesn’t shift or give as he continues to prod at it, which is good in that it means it won’t come down on his head, but bad in that it means there’s no clear way to get through to where Buck is somewhere on the other side. 

Keeping track of Elyan’s explanation as she walks him through what’s going on outside isn’t the easiest thing Bobby’s ever done. Her echoing voice is difficult for Bobby and his rattled brain to follow, and to be honest, he’s not exactly trying as hard as he could be. Though he zones in and out, he gets the general gist. Elyan is outside acting as incident commander for the collapse, coordinating the two ladders that had responded to the situation. Neither of them are the 118, and Bobby doesn’t register much beyond that in terms of who else is outside. He’s far more preoccupied with who’s still inside. 

Buck. Buck is here somewhere, in this half-destroyed structure, probably hurt, probably bleeding. Bleeding too much, too fast, everywhere, bleeding _out,_ because- Because- Bobby realizes it in a flash of insight so strong and sudden it yanks a jolt of nausea through him, the name of the drug slicing through the muddled fog in his mind and plastering itself to the inside of his skull in thirty foot high marquis neon. 

Heparin. The medication Heparin is an anticoagulant, a blood thinner, prescribed often to combat the formation of dangerous clots. Side effects and risks include increased risk of bruising, hypersensitivity, and hemorrhage. 

Hemorrhage. Bleeding. Bleeding that, once it’s started, once the wound has been dealt to the body the drug runs through the veins of, doesn’t stop. 

It feels like there’s a Wikipedia page being read in Bobby’s ear. He can almost hear Buck’s voice rising and falling as they walk to a scene together, mile-a-minute words playing hopscotch over pieces of information he’d absorbed late one night lost down some internet rabbit hole or other. But this isn’t Buck’s voice, and this isn’t a Wikipedia page the kid’s gotten sidetracked by, it’s a medication that’s been helping to ensure he stays alive that’s now probably killing him. It’s killing him _fast_ and Bobby doesn’t have time to waste listening to the voice of the incident commander who’s yelling at him from his shirt pocket again, his name jerking him out of his focus on his goal over and over until-

“What?” Bobby demands, going still, hands raw and throbbing on rough chunks of concrete wedged against what he thinks is the wall of the garage. In another situation he might’ve felt immediately bad for the snap in the word, but this isn’t another situation, and every second he spends talking to Elyan is a second he spends not trying to get to Buck. 

“We’re almost to you, Captain Nash,” Elyan tells him, and if she’s bothered by being snapped at, she doesn’t show it. She sounds insistent and focused, commanding in a way he can remember sounding dozens of times over when trying to direct some terrified civilian to cooperate with him to save their own life.

This isn’t about _his_ life though. If Bobby walks out of this parking garage and leaves Buck behind here alone, his life won’t be anything he wants to return to. Not if it means having to live with having done that. But Bobby doesn’t have the opportunity to corral his wayward thoughts together in time to express anything approaching that sentiment before the woman on the phone is talking to him again.

Elyan tells him there’s a stairwell right by him and they’ve managed to get it shored up. She goes on to explain that there’s still a troublesome area of debris blocking their direct access. It’s just a few feet worth, and Elyan thinks that if they clear some of it, he’ll be able to make it through. The problem is, she says after a few moments where her voice fuzzes out like she’s leaned away and conferred with someone out of range of the phone’s speaker, that they can’t send someone in after him. It would be too unstable, even after clearing some kind of gap, and with the gear of the firefighters working to reach him it would be too risky to try and fit through if Bobby’s capable of moving on his own. 

It’s nowhere as simple as all that, though. Yes, Bobby is capable of moving on his own. But no, he’s not going to, at least not in the way she’s telling him he needs to. He’s already shaking his head as she’s telling him what they want him to do when the gap they’re working on is wide enough, then eventually remembers that Elyan can’t see him, and he’ll have to speak aloud for his point to get across.

“I can’t do that,” Bobby says, figuring that it would be best to cut straight to the point. There’s a pause and some indistinct sound from the phone, then Elyan returns.

“Is your condition worsening?” There’s a sharp concern in her voice and Bobby shakes his head again, despite the increased pain it causes and the fact that she still can’t see him.

“I can walk, but I can’t leave. Not while Buck is still in here somewhere.” Somewhere in his mind, Bobby knows there’s something more he should be telling her, something he should be using to explain the urgency of his need to remain here and get to Buck. It also feels like important information for Elyan to be able to pass on to the paramedics who came with her, some fact it would be critical for them to have. But, even though he knows he’d come upon it himself at some point, he can’t locate it again. It’s slipped through Bobby’s fingers like the small, fast silver fish he and his brother used to try and catch at a small lake near his childhood home during the summers. 

“I understand your concern, Captain Nash, I would be worried too in your place. I wouldn’t want to leave either if it were one of my guys in there. But you can also imagine being in _my_ place, I’m sure. We have people working on the other side of the building, where your wife said Mr. Buckley-” Her voice cuts off, goes distant and too distorted to make out, then returns. “Where your wife said Buck was. But I’m over _here_ which means my job is you, and getting you out. And I need you to help me make that happen, alright?”

She’s not understanding. Bobby _needs_ to find Buck, and this isn’t some friend or coworker he’s lost track of. Well, it _is_ but at the same time it’s something else too, something else that Elyan can’t be aware of the gravity of, or she wouldn’t be asking this of him. There’s a panic and heartache lodged in Bobby’s chest that grows stronger every moment that passes that he still doesn’t have eyes on Buck, and it won’t let him stop looking. He’s held hostage to it, and he needs Elyan to understand why he can’t just turn around and leave, stop combing through the rubble for any opening to the side of the garage Buck had been standing on.

“He’s- Listen, Buck is-” Bobby breaks off, his thoughts refusing to organize into an explanation that can come out of his mouth coherently. He can’t corral together an explanation that would get her to understand who Buck is, what it would mean for Bobby to leave him. The whole story is complicated and probably a little odd to most people, and it’s more than he can seem to arrange, and he’s wasting valuable time. So instead he abandons the endeavor and goes with the easy path, the bluntest, most direct way to get to the point, even if it feels somehow to Bobby like something he’s not supposed to admit out loud to this stranger. “He’s my kid. I can’t leave.”

“Bobby I need you to calm down, okay? Your son’s a firefighter, right? That means he knows what to do. He knows how to help the crew working on that side get him out safely. The collapse was far worse on this side of the building, if he’s hurt, it probably isn’t severe.”

The comment pings something, the thought of the probable extent of Buck’s hypothetical injuries sending what he’d been so desperate to remember earlier right back to the forefront of Bobby’s brain, and the pressure is abruptly right back on. He needs to get this across so that Elyan knows about it before he loses the thread for the umpteenth time in this mess of a situation.

“You don’t understand,” he says back, voice loud in his own ears even against the persistent ringing that’s laying a background ache in behind the sharp throb coming from behind his left ear. “He’s on blood thinners, he- Even a minor injury could kill him if you don’t stop the bleeding fast. The blood thinners, he’s basically a…” The word slips out of his grasp and Bobby looks for it with mounting desperation. He urgently needs them to understand this, to know the consequences if Buck isn’t found quickly enough. 

The woman on the other end of the phone is talking to him, he knows she is, but Bobby can’t afford to listen to what she’s saying, not when that word is just out of his grasp. Elyan’s voice rattles in his ears like a dozen swarming wasps and he bats a hand in front of his face like he could physically clear the distraction. The name of the drug that had occurred to him earlier, the reason it’s so vitally urgent to find Buck, is out of his grasp, vanished back into the crush of incomprehensible static. All Bobby can remember is the risk. The blood, the way Buck, if cut, could bleed, and bleed, and bleed until there was nothing left. And then suddenly there it is, the word slamming into his rattled brain with all the force of a concussive blow. 

“Hemophiliac. He’s basically a hemophiliac right now, he starts bleeding and he won’t stop.”

Bobby sees it unbidden, superimposed over the gloom and clearer than any feature of where he actually is, what’s actually surrounding him. The blood and how fast it would come, how quick it would soak through Buck’s shirt as it left him. Knowing things is great until you can’t turn it off, and right now Bobby is haunted by the things he knows. There are between nine and twelve pints of blood in the body of the average human adult. There are many ways to lose that blood and over the course of his career, Bobby has seen just about all of them. 

And he sees them all over again now, layered over the mental image of Buck’s body, sprawled in the rubble somewhere Bobby can’t see him. Buck is somewhere out of sight, bleeding, the drug in his system that’s helping keep him healthy now helping to kill him that much quicker, and Bobby isn’t _there_ and they’re not letting him help. The math tries to do itself in his head but his brain is just a little too scrambled for that, the hypothetical equations snagging and snarling around each other into an indecipherable mess. It doesn’t matter anyway. The only part that matters is he needs to get to Buck, _now._

“Bobby, I have your wife here with me. I’ve asked her about what you’ve said.” Elyan’s voice is just barely loud enough to break through the screeching interference in his mind, but what she says is sufficient to at least give him pause.

“Athena?” he asks, heart suddenly thundering even harder against his sternum. It’s deafening inside Bobby’s head, a cacophony of his concussion buzzing, pulse racing, thoughts hollering at him. “Is she okay?”

“You spoke to her earlier,” Elyan reminds him, and Bobby does remember now that she’s said it, how Athena had been the one to call him in the first place before passing the phone off to the other station’s captain. “She’s telling me that your son was on blood thinners for a while because of a clotting problem but the issue resolved and he hasn’t been on the medication for several weeks now. Athena said he’s not on Heparin anymore, Bobby.”

Heparin. That’s the name of the medication, that’s what Bobby had been trying to remember. “Has she- Did she get ahold of him? Did she talk to Buck, is he okay?”

“No, we haven’t been able to reach him yet, but it’s only a matter of time. We have another crew on the other side of the building working to get to him. The collapse on that side wasn’t as severe-”

Whatever she says next, Bobby doesn’t hear it. Nothing after that matters, not when it means that Elyan and Athena still haven’t been able to reach Buck, that _nobody’s_ been able to contact him. Nothing has changed. Buck is still alone, still probably hurt, probably bleeding to death, Bobby can’t find a way to get to where he is, and the voice coming through his phone keeps trying to tell him to _leave._

“Bobby listen to me.” That’s Athena’s voice now. She’s back on the phone and Bobby clutches to that like a lifeline, both to the sound of her words and to the phone itself, pulling it out of his pocket and holding it in front of him, the light from the screen making the air look smokey with dust that still hasn’t settled. 

“I can’t find him,” Bobby tells her. It feels like the first time he set foot in a new confession booth, the unique tugging nausea of saying something horrible to someone new for the first time, clawing out your guilt and holding it up so they can see. He thinks he may have told her already, the words feel familiar coming out, but he can’t be sure, not when the entirety of his brain feels like it was run through a food processor and put back wrong. “Athena, I lost Buck. He’s here, somewhere, he’s- He’s hurt, and I can’t- The blood thinners-”

“He’s not on them anymore. Please, Bobby, you have to do what they’re asking you to do. The collapse wasn’t that bad, and there’s another team working to get to Buck now. They’re gonna find him and he’s gonna be okay, but you-” 

“He never left me.” Even to himself Bobby knows he sounds desperate. His voice is cracked and wet, he sounds terrible and pathetic and nothing like a station captain, but damn it, he’s _not_ a station captain right now. Right now he’s a man whose kid is trapped somewhere, in danger, failing to do his God-sent job and _protect his family._ “Buck wouldn’t leave me, not when he should’ve, not even when I ordered him to. Over and over he wouldn’t leave me. So I can’t- I can’t do that to him. That- That _dumb kid_ wouldn’t leave me behind to save his life, and he’s terrified of being alone. You know he is.” These are things Bobby knows he shouldn’t be saying out loud, not when there’s people on the other side of this phone call, strangers who shouldn’t be hearing this. But he can’t understand why Athena doesn’t get it, won’t let him stay to find Buck. After all, Buck isn’t just his, he’s _theirs._ She of all people should understand perfectly. “I’m not gonna be the one to prove him right. I won’t leave, not while he’s still in there. I can’t leave. 

“I know.” The words stop Bobby in his tracks, the relief of them making him dizzy. (Well. More dizzy than he’d already been.) His knuckles creak as his grip on the phone goes impossibly tighter, Athena’s voice a lighthouse beam in a wild and unnavigable storm as it continues to spill from the speaker. “I know you couldn’t leave Buck alone if he was scared and hurt and needed help. And _you_ know that I would never ask you to. Think about it. Do you honestly believe I would _ever_ ask you to abandon a member of our family? _Hell_ no. So you _have_ to believe me when I tell you they’re coming for him, they’re getting him out, and we’re gonna see him right in front of us, probably just as soon as they get _you_ out of there. But in order for them to get you out of there, and focus on helping Buck if it _is_ more complicated to get to him, you need to cooperate. Okay? Can you do that?”

Bobby doesn’t remember a lot of what happens next. Even in the moment things slip away as they’re happening, sand through his fingers that he doesn’t honestly try that hard to hold onto. It’s not important, and he has to use his limited capacity for retention to keep track of things that are. The firefighters waiting for him when he makes it through the section of the collapse they’d cleared a hole in aren’t anybody he knows. He thinks he might vaguely recognize a face or two, but the recognition fades as soon as it has arrived. They don’t let him attempt to navigate the stairwell on his own, and it’s probably an indication of just how badly rattled his brain is that he doesn’t try and fight it when they get him strapped onto a backboard to be carried down the short flight to the ground. 

Once outside, the light from the midday sun is agonizingly blinding. Bobby’s eyes snap shut the instant they leave the dark shade of the inside of the garage, the pain of the brightness so intense to his damaged head that it arrests his breath and throws what was left of his thought process into a static scream. He doesn’t know how long he spends laying there on the backboard, trying to draw in a breath around the intense shock to his system, before he’s able to crack his eyes open again and slowly adjust to the sun’s relentless burning strength. 

“Bobby,” someone says as he allows the unfamiliar paramedics to release him from and then slowly help him off of the backboard and onto a gurney that had been waiting for him just outside the door. “Bobby,” the voice repeats, louder, striking something in his unreliable memory. It’s Captain Raina Elyan, he realizes as she starts speaking again. The realization is quickly swept away, though, when he processes what she’s saying. What it means. “We got him, Bobby. The folks from the 122 got to Buck, he’s out of the building, he’s-”

Whatever else Elyan was saying fuzzes out, Bobby’s throbbing head dropping to the gurney’s padded surface. Relief feels cold and prickly in his veins, a strange compliment to the adrenaline that had kept him upright and mobile for so long, chased by the same surging anxiety he’s grown used to since he woke up alone in the ruined garage. 

“Where- I mean, is he…” Bobby’s questions don’t come out the way he means them to, half put together and, he’s sure, incomprehensible. He doesn’t waste energy trying to make it come out clearer, not when there are more important things to be worried about. Laying back on the gurney, his field of vision is severely limited, and Bobby doesn’t think they’d let him get up even if he could. 

Off to the side, something about the conversation happening between the paramedics changes. The voices get louder, someone asks a question, someone else answers in what sounds like an instruction, commanding directions followed by rapid footsteps, and then there’s someone beside the gurney, close enough for Bobby to see clearly. 

The face that comes into view slices through the binding that’s been restricting Bobby’s chest tighter and tighter ever since he woke up and recognized that something horrible had happened. Anxious eyes search his face and his torso, every part of him Bobby can see. Blond hair, bright blue irises, strawberry birthmark that leaves him walking through life looking permanently bruised. Bobby searches all of it, every inch of that familiar face and there’s nothing. Oh Buck is disheveled, grime smudged across his forehead and soot clinging to his eyelashes and giving his entire person a vaguely grey hue, but that’s all. No missing limbs. No crushed skull.

No blood. 

“Bobby?” The question is hesitant and scared. It’s a voice he hasn’t heard Buck use often and it makes Bobby want to sit up, climb off this gurney, hunt around until he finds the thing that put it there and destroys it so Buck will never sound that small and frightened again. 

Unable to make it up even an inch, Bobby gives up and instead reaches out, hand waving clumsily through empty air until his fingertips catch the fabric of Buck’s shirt. He pats at it, snagging the button up to pull the kid around in a jagged, spun in place circle. Buck goes willingly, moving along with the grip on his shirt though Bobby was in absolutely no shape to manhandle anyone anywhere if they so much as refused to comply, never mind put up any kind of fight. He doesn’t resist, nor does he ask any questions. The back of his shirt is as dust-coated as the front is, but nothing strikes through the flat grey. 

“Not bleeding,” Bobby says, voice barely above a whisper, the loudest he can force out of his strained lungs, rough with concrete dust and relief. His hand slips from its hold on Buck’s shirt, swooping nauseatingly through the air until he catches control of it and raises it again. With far more effort than it should have taken, Bobby eventually guides it out and up until it lands on the side of Buck’s face, thumb brushing a darker flake of pulverized building material from under his eye. It could be his imagination, but Bobby thinks he feels it when he repeats himself, choking out, “You’re not- not bleeding,” as the whole, undamaged face pushes slightly against his hand, pressing that much harder into his palm. 

“Bobby?” It’s the same name but the question feels different now. Bobby can’t explain exactly how, what it means, but the fear has eased and in its place is something like amusement but softer. 

“Hep-” breaks off into coughing, Buck’s hand coming up to anxiously clutch at Bobby’s wrist until he regains enough breath to finish the word. “Heparin.” When he says it, Buck’s face crumples into a bruised fondness, eyebrows raised in something close to surprise.

“Let’s let them take him to the hospital now, alright?” Athena’s voice has joined the collection of sounds Bobby’s trying to make sense of, and Bobby sees her hands curled over Buck’s shoulders. 

Hearing her makes him feel like the sun’s broken through a week’s worth of thunderous cloud cover, cutting the wind dead still and making him feel warm for the first time in a long, cold winter. He tries to say something to that effect but he can’t get his mouth to cooperate so he settles for staring, awed by her all over again. Athena steps closer around Buck, keeping ahold of him with one hand while the other reaches out to take his, lifting it to press a kiss to dusty, slightly scraped knuckles. For a moment she and Bobby look at each other and Bobby gets a clear view of the suddenly brightly evident fear in her eyes, just beginning to seep away at being able to see and touch him after only speaking to him over the phone. Then she sets his hand back down and backs away, pulling Buck with her.

The paramedics from the 103 start pushing the gurney towards the ambulance and finally, left with nothing urgent enough to keep him tethered to consciousness and focus, Bobby lets the world slip away. 

When Bobby wakes up, his hospital room is blessedly dim and quiet. There’s still a raging headache throbbing at his temples and the back of his skull, but his thoughts are far less disorganized, which is a relief. Not being able to think clearly is the worst part of concussions by far, if you ask Bobby. Things are still somewhat hazy and slow, like he’s dragging every concept in his mind out of some kind of thick tar, but they’re there, and they make sense. Looking around, he’s able to take in his surroundings fairly easily, and figure out what they mean with not much more effort than usual.

Athena’s sleeping in a chair by his right and he can tell she’d fallen asleep worried. It’s in the frown creasing her forehead, the thin lines etched between her furrowed eyebrows that always follow her even into the land of nod when there’s something she’s thinking hard about. Turning his head slowly so as not to aggravate the injury, Bobby looks to the other side of the bed, where he’s noticed an odd shift in the level of the mattress. 

It’s explained as soon as he sees Buck. The kid’s also asleep, slumped forward nearly out of his chair, using his folded arms as a pillow so close to Bobby’s side that he can feel faint warmth close to his ribs through the thin material of his hospital-issue gown. There’s still concrete dust in his hair, taking it from its usual blond into more of a greyish white territory, and the sheet on the bed is crumpled in the hand Bobby can see, sleep-lax fingers betraying where they had earlier been clutching fabric in an anxious fist. 

“Tried to get him to go home and wash all that crud off.” 

Athena’s voice startles Bobby just a little despite how quiet it is, enough for him to jolt slightly, which in turn jostles the mattress and Buck, sleeping on it. Some kind of instinct guides his hand, going automatically to the back of Buck’s neck, pressing his palm there gently and sweeping his thumb over Buck’s hairline to settle him and wordlessly apologize for the disturbance all in one. When he turns to look, Athena’s eyes are open, though half-lidded, obviously still tired. Her expression is worried and warm and the corner of her mouth quirks into a smile.

“You can see how well that turned out.” 

Bobby lets out a muffled snort of a laugh. He can indeed. He can feel it, too, in the slightly gritty texture of Buck’s dusty hair under the pad of his thumb. 

The light-heartedness of the amusement only lasts for a moment, though, until more of the day’s events come seeping back into Bobby’s conscious awareness. His memory of what had happened in the garage is piecemeal at best, but he can recall enough to know at the very least that he hadn’t made himself particularly easy to rescue.

“Sorry,” he says, cringing. “I don’t remember a lot, but I think I made that pretty hard on you guys. I’ll have to call the incident commander, Captain, uh-”

“Captain Raina Elyan, she’s with the 103,” Athena provides, and Bobby nods.

“I’ll have to call her and thank her. I don’t think I made that easy on her, that’s pretty embarrassing to think about.”

“Everybody understood, you had good reason to think you needed to stay and get to him. You were pretty freaked out. It was about Heparin,” she says with a slight shake of her head, like she can’t hardly believe it. Bobby frowns, and she elaborates. “Your head... You were confused. You thought he was still on the Heparin and the bleeding risk put him in serious danger of even a minor injury becoming lethal if he wasn’t found fast enough. We tried to tell you he wasn’t on it any more, but it was like no matter how many times you were told, you couldn’t hold onto the information.”

“Oh.” Now that she’s said it, Bobby can remember the thought process. Not only that but he can remember the panic that had come along with it, clearly enough that his light grip on Buck tightens slightly. Watching Buck choke on his own blood in his and Athena’s backyard, going to pick him up from the hospital after he’d gotten that cut on his arm on Halloween and trying to brace himself for what kind of nightmare he’d be walking into before he’d seen Buck there in the waiting room, bandaged but mostly fine… Combine that with all the other far too numerous times Bobby was forced to play spectator as Buck was physically and emotionally battered by the cruelty of others as well as just plain bad luck, and it makes sense he’d have gotten fixated on that. 

“I’m sorry you had to hear all that,” Bobby says to her after the long pause of absorbing what she’d told him. “That must’ve been scary to have to listen to from the outside, I don’t know what I’d have done if it was me outside and you and him in there.” Even the thought makes him shudder, selfishly glad it hadn’t been him on the outside, that at least he’d gotten to be inside the nightmare rather than forced to play a helpless spectator to it.

“Well it was no picnic, that’s for sure.” There’s something Athena’s not saying, some part of the reality of her experience with what happened that day that she’s holding back, but for the moment, Bobby lets it go. They’ll have a longer talk when they’re home and neither of them is exhausted or having trouble keeping their heads on straight. At least for now, he allows her to end the conversation when she says, “I’m just glad we got both of you out of there in more or less one piece.”

“Amen to that,” Bobby responds with the sincerity of someone who means it, not just using a colloquialism. His attention drifts down again, watching the rise and fall of Buck’s back as he breathes, slow and deep and obviously still out cold despite the conversation happening in the room.

It’s something that strikes an odd chord in Bobby’s chest, one he can’t quite put a name to. Buck has always been a light sleeper. Or, at least, that’s what Bobby had thought. He’s the first to rocket out of bed when they’re on call at the station, and when he’s dozed off on the couch in between calls even footsteps coming too close are enough to wake him. Chim and Hen have been known to stake themselves out at the table playing a card game and glare murderously at anybody approaching where Buck sleeps behind them, daring the interloper to risk disturbing him. But then, there’s other factors to consider now too. 

There’s the memory of Buck on the back patio at Hen’s house late one afternoon, arms folded loosely and head tipped back, forehead clear of any hint of a frown as he slept while Denny and Harry played some strange mutation of tag. There’s the last time he stayed over in Bobby and Athena’s guest room, practically comatose by the time he shuffled off to bed, rising at the same time as May that Saturday morning - late - when Bobby finally made the rounds of knocking on doors and announcing breakfast. And here he is now, crumpled over against the side of a hospital mattress, Bobby’s hand on his bare neck, a conversation happening around him, and not once has he stirred. 

Maybe, like everything else with Buck, it’s a little more complicated than just ‘light sleeper or no.’

“Go back to sleep,” Athena tells Bobby eventually, obviously noticing the way he’s having trouble keeping his own eyes open too. He’s been feeling them get heavier and heavier the longer he’s sat and watched the soothingly repetitive rhythm of Buck’s steady breathing. “You don’t have to keep us in sight, we’ll both still be here when you wake up. Michael’s got the kids and him… I don’t think you could pry him out of here with a crowbar. We’ll be alright. You can rest.”

“Yeah, okay,” Bobby murmurs, body and mind both feeling heavy as he’s pulled back towards sleep. The last thing he registers before he fades out completely is the feeling of his hand, still resting on the back of Buck’s neck, slipping down just far enough to register a pulse, faint but nevertheless steady and strong. 


End file.
